If nothing else, our experiences tell us that people are no damn good. Do you remember where you were when you heard the news that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been attacked and another plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001? I happened to catch the news at home when the first plane flew into the building. At that moment, most of us thought it was some sort of weird accident—mechanical or human failure on the part of the pilots. I hurriedly rushed to my office. Shortly after I arrived and turned on the television at work, we saw the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. The rest of the day, if not the rest of the year, was a blur. In some ways we have been trying to rebuild our national lives from the rubble of “Ground Zero” ever since.3

If that day taught us anything at all, it is that evil exists in this world. But how and why? Some people like to explain evil in mystical or spiritual terms, even going so far as to personify evil in a character known as Satan or the devil. Others prefer to talk about the “Fall” of humanity, original sin, and the corruption of human nature. Still others prefer to talk about evil solely in natural terms—we are nothing more than advanced animals and therefore we are inherently violent.4 Whatever your favorite explanation for the presence of evil in the world is, the bottom line is that it is real. It exists. Evil, and its sidekick, suffering, dominate the news around the world every day.

Human experience also informs us that there are two kinds of evil in the world. There is natural evil, which includes things like hurricanes, pandemics, and accidents, and there is moral evil, which is what people do to one another, to other creatures, and to the environment. Both kinds of evil cause suffering. The difference between natural and moral evil is the absence of motive in the former and the presence of motive in the latter. Unless we want to make the asinine argument that a personal God is responsible for natural evil, motivated by retribution or a divine mean streak, then natural evil just is. There is no intention behind the act. We therefore do not need to spend much time on the causes of natural evil.

Moral evil, on the other hand, often occurs because someone intends to do harm to someone or something else. This is the kind of evil that I will be observing, with the keen eye of an evilologist, in this book.

Evil is ever-present. It is not going away any time soon. Every day is an ethical Ground Zero. Every day we are forced to go back to square one, or the forbidden fruit, and wonder why. In this chapter I will make the argument that yes, we are no damn good, which is a very simple argument to make.

In the fourth chapter of his book, beginning in verse 11, Jeremiah channels his inner-God-voice and writes, “At that time it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem: A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward my . . . people.” (Note that the people who attacked us on 9/11 were people from the desert in the Middle East.) From Jeremiah’s perspective, God was using the Babylonians to punish the Israelites. The Israelites are called “foolish,” “stupid children” and “skilled in doing evil.” And then it gets very interesting. Listen to the angry voice of Jeremiah’s God with a little inappropriate commentary:6

That is sort of eerie, is it not? Jeremiah is not predicting 9/11, of course, yet the lessons of the past continue as lessons of the present: evil is real, there are people who want to harm us, and most importantly we need to be aware of how our own decisions and actions can lead to hatred and violence—evil and suffering—in the world.

Jeremiah’s theological view that God was punishing the Israelites through the Babylonians may seem archaic to us, and yet it is interesting that he was willing to assign at least some of the blame for the Babylonian invasion to the Israelites themselves. If we as a nation are wise, we will look at how our own policies can foment violence in a world that is always on a short fuse.

Evil is real, yet complicated. Psalm 14 does not mince words by claiming that there is a wide swath of “evildoers”: “There is no one who does good . . . they have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one” (vss. 1–3).8 That is a harsh view of humanity, and yet we can only imagine what the psalmist was living through as he or she wrote those words.